Project EXCALIBUR
UNITED NATIONS SPACE COMMAND TRANSMISSION 37764-12254/EXC SENT: August 27th, 2548 (UNSC Military Calendar) Eridani II Slipspace COM Relay Alpha-Gamma-Kappa-4426 FROM: Lieutenant Commander Michael Pomare TO: Colonel James Hoylake SUBJECT: Project EXCALIBUR CLASSIFICATION: CLASSIFIED NOVEMBER-BLACK // INITIATING PRIMARY SECURITY SCAN JULIET-ALPHA 4492 // // 14 DATA COURRUPTIONS DETECTED // // INITIATING CORRUPT DATA PURGE // // ALERT: SECURITY FIREWALL BREACH DETECTED // // INTRUDER DESIGNATED HOSTILE // // HOSTILE INTRUDER ISOLATED: JULIET ALPHA-20101 // // UPLOADING MIL.VIR. 7896D “AVALON” // // UPLOAD COMPLETE // // FIREWALL BUFFER ENHANCED PER {ONI.SEC.PROG.333/7B “ENIGMA”} // // NO FURTHER SECURITY BREACHES DETECTED // // SECURITY BREACH FORWARDED TO UNSC OFFICE OF INVESTIGATIONS // // CAVEAT // WARNING: This document is protected under Office of Naval Intelligence Security Protocol 1A. Disclosure of its contents to personnel lower than BLACK is an offense punishable by court(s) martial and imprisonment/execution for treasonous acts. Failure to disclose confirmed or suspected breaches of security will be treated as complicity, and is punishable by dishonourable discharge and/or imprisonment. //START FILE// My apologies for the lateness. The transfer from TEMERITY to EXCALIBUR was a difficult one, and I fought it at every step. I hope you enjoy the office. And the disaster at Magog, and the recent operations in Sigma Octanus, have left my resources spread quite thin, especially my recovery teams. We’re getting double the tech we used to – it almost feels like the Covenant simply don’t care anymore. I can’t say I can blame them – we have, what, a handful of colonies left? We’re on the edge of a cliff, my friend, and if we don’t get pushed off we might just have to jump. But I digress. The R&D section has been kept busy on the initial prototypes, so I regret than a number of your ideas are still in the concept stages right now. The Navy brass have expressed quite a lot of interest in your Arsenal Ship ideas, and we’ve begun conversion of the UNSC Retribution and the UNSC Invincible – your ideas on the Neith and Gungnir missiles have been slower to gain traction, mostly because of the expense of developing such new technologies, though the EMLS and Thanatos systems have received the vote of confidence from Section III. Parangosky isn’t too happy about having her funds diverted, but I could care less how the old harpy feels after the crap I was put through with Project VAJRA. We’ve brought a few of our older stuff to the selection committee – the Anubis apparently shows a lot of promise but “needs further time to develop the advanced technologies used.” Which is their way of saying “better luck next time.” Still, I suppose it gives us a chance to incorporate the electromagnetic improvements your team has made. Enclosed is a summary of the different projects EXCALIBUR is working on currently. Naturally, you will be familiar with most of them – I have already forwarded you the more detailed proposals for several of them, and your own proposals you will be intimately familiar with, although my team has had to make a small number of corrections and changes from the original proposals. Nevertheless, these are the same summaries that I will be forwarding to the UNSC Security Committee – the selection committee has wasted enough of my time, and there’s no classified secrets for Parangosky to get worked up about. That should speed things up a bit. Ackerson in particular has been keeping tabs on me – you know I was followed the other day? I had Glaurung redeploy the poor fellow to Troy, or some other backwater colony, but its nice to see I’m attracting the interest of someone like that. Still not sure whether it’s a good thing or not. On a side note, the security program enclosed with this file was also developed by EXCALIBUR – a little something we’ve been cooking up in Section III for a while. It’s still a prototype in the beta test stages at the moment, but its already proven effective. Do you know that it’s detected and responded to thirty two security violations? And its low-level artificial intelligence is just sophisticated enough to understand a concept like “vengeance.” You can imagine the sheepish glances we got when Ackerson’s teams asked us over to fix the numerous embarrassing bugs they suddenly found in their systems. We may remove that function, or we may not – I like the idea myself. Having your computer set on fire is a good incentive not to pry. // PROJECTS // Project EXCALIBUR/Rejected|Rejected Project EXCALIBUR/Concept|Approved for Development Project EXCALIBUR/Prototype|Under Development Project EXCALIBUR/Testing|Beginning Final Testing Project EXCALIBUR/Entering|Entering Service //END FILE// // INITIATING TERMINAL HISTORY PURGE // // ERASING FILE: “PROJECT: EXCALIBUR // // CLASSIFYING REFERENCES: “EXCALIBUR” “ANCILE” “TARNHELM” “TEMERITY” // // PROCESSES COMPLETE // // UNABLE TO FIND REQUESTED FILE. DO YOU WISH TO RESTART SEARCH? //